The Traitor
by Miss Whiskers
Summary: When Harry Potter goes back in time to fix things, we allow that he has to lie, manipulate, kill, and let a few good people die so as to kill Voldemort. Well, Peter Pettigrew once went back in time, too.


_There have been a lot of time travel stories (a few alternate dimension ones, too) about Harry trying to fix things. Hermione, Malfoy, and a whole host of secondary characters feature in the genre of fanfiction, and I think Peter Pettigrew deserves a little attention, too._

_For all that traitors are realistic, that JK Rowling's Pettigrew is a cowardly little son of a bitch, and that James and Lily Potter dying was a pretty sad thing, it's too perfect. I mean, two people's deaths creating a thirteen-year long peace, simultaneously giving the evil wizard's opponent mystical love powers that would ultimately defeat said evil wizard? Who from a time where that didn't happen wouldn't try to create that eventuality, even if that person was a really good friend of the two he would try to kill?_

_So, new story time._

_And, I know. I suck; I should be working on AiAW. But that story is like an irresponsible acquaintance who used to be a good friend. He's occasionally entertaining, and you have fond memories of a time when he might have made something out of himself, but you'd never want to have to depend on him for a ride, and deep down you know he's heading nowhere. Sorry._

_I really like this plotline (yes, it actually has one), and am pretty certain it's going places. But, if I'm not working on this, chances are I'm writing about alien invasions, which are possibly even more entertaining than fanfiction: www. how to survive alien invasion novels .devhub .com_

* * *

><p><strong><span>The Traitor<span>**

"Get down! Get down!" Sirius barely acknowledged a harsh scream before ducking below a blasted wall, dragging a nearby student down with him behind the rough cover.

"Shit!" he yelled as a volley of spells flew past, going through where his torso had been just seconds ago and taking out an Auror that had been behind him. Her bloody corpse fell to the ground and the student beside him screamed in terror. "You," he said forcefully, staring at the student's face for a blank second before a name came into focus, "Granger – you're not cleared for the front lines! Get back to your assigned— "

She shook her head, eyes wide and staring. "The Hospital Wing is gone."

"What do you mean, gone? They haven't gotten past us!"

"One of the casualties," she paused, sucking in a wavering breath and wincing as screams erupted from one corner of the Great Hall, "one of the casualties had a bomb. One of the Death Eaters fused it to his chest. As soon as Madam Pomfrey cast a diagnostic spell, it went off and killed everyone. It must have had two charges, because it killed everyone surrounding him and then a second blast made the ceilings and walls cave in…"

"God damnit, stay here for a second then." He conjured a mirror to peer over the edge of the wall and his eyes met those of a Death Eater, whose face was obscured by a dented mask that left the bottom half of his face visible. The other man smiled gruesomely and stepped forward to fight Sirius, but the dog Animagus just bounced a slicing hex off the glass and turned to look back at Hermione before the Death Eater released a final howl of pain and fell to the floor dead.

"Why are you telling me this? Wasn't Flitwick…" She shook her head.

"Nearly everyone has been moved from remote posts to the front of the castle. I couldn't find anyone before I got here, and you were the only one I could reach."

He pulled a mirror out of his front pocket. "James Potter!"

Muffled shouts issued from the mirror, but the view was obscured by the majority of the hand holding it. "A bit busy, Padfoot. News?"

Sirius thrust the mirror in Granger's direction before slowly rotating the mirror he had conjured to observe the fighting. "Tell him everything you told me, and then tell me everything he tells you. Reducto!"

The Great Hall was overrun by Death Eaters and other followers of Voldemort, clearly outnumbering the few scattered Aurors and Professors. The situation was dire, but Voldemort himself must have been occupied elsewhere and Sirius was, if not relieved, at least less hopeless than he would have been had the Dark Lord joined the Death Eaters in the attack.

His cousin's mad cackle resounded at his right, and Sirius turned to see Bellatrix Lestrange holding a trio of seventh years under the Cruciatus Curse. The Curse should only affect one person at a time, he knew, but Bellatrix had long circumvented this restriction by melting the hands of her victims to others, creating a string of body that couldn't stop the physical contact which the Curse used to travel from person to person.

He growled as he pointed his wand in her direction. "Sectumsempra!"

She cut her gleeful shriek short as she ducked just in time to miss the curse. Her face twisted in hatred as she turned to smile at him. "Avada Kedavra, dear cousin!"

He easily summoned a rock into the path of the spell before flicking his wand and forcing the rock to zoom towards her face. This time, she didn't duck, letting the rock gouge her cheek as she screamed a spell at him. The beam widened, losing intensity gaining in diameter until he couldn't dodge or block it.

Two hands grabbed his ankles and yanked, making him lose his balance. He fell ungracefully to the ground and watched the beginning of the light slide a few meters further before fading from sight completely. Bellatrix waved at him happily and ran forward, twisting to dodge spells so she could battle her cousin more closely. Grimacing at the shards of glass that had sliced his palms as he had fallen to the ground, he aimed his wand at Bellatrix and whispered, "Riddikulus."

Recognizing the spell's color and being surprised at the apparent non sequiter, Bellatrix didn't cast a shield, and her body absorbed the spell. Her robes transformed into Muggle business attire, the skirt restricting her long steps and jacket confining her arm movements. Snarling in rage, the woman glared down at herself and ignored Sirius entirely as she worked at changing her clothes back to robes. He chopped off her head and set her wand on fire before turning to see who had grabbed his ankles.

The Granger girl stared back at him. "Mr. Potter said not to be an idiot. Dueling Bellatrix Lestrange seems to qualify.

Sirius muttered under his breath about how he'd won, didn't he, before crabbing his way back behind the shattered wall. He took a pack of grenades out of his pocket and plucked the mirror out of Granger's hand, replacing it with the grenades. "Take these and individually throw them in different areas of the Hall. Don't worry," he glanced over at her, noting her expression and remembering that she was Muggleborn and probably knew the nonmagical grenades from which his had been derived, "they and their shrapnel can only hurt those with the Dark Mark."

She hastily began unwrapping them and passing them to another student. The second girl began throwing them with a long arm towards the concentrations of Death Eaters, and he turned the mirror. "Ideas, Prongs?"

Part of Lily's face was reflected through the mirror. "He's busy fighting off the Acromantulas. But he says to get all the students you can and—"

"And get the fuck out!" A voice that was farther away yelled.

"—and get out."

"Get out? But-"

The mirror's view twisted crazily until it showed James Potter's bruised and grim face. "Sirius, it's over. We can't win here. All we can do is take the students and run. The battle lasted long enough for the third years to strip the library, but the Death Eaters are winning. The last team is pulling out in ten minutes and then Dumbledore's pulling up wards that'll level the castle the second someone uses dark magic. Can you do anything with the dead?"

"We can't take any bodies," Sirius said, shaking his head, "or the heavily wounded. Granger told you about the Wing?"

"Yeah, she did. Sirius…"

"Yes?"

"Just make sure you get the hell out."

The mirror went blank.

"You heard the man," Sirius turned to Granger, the other girl, and two more students who had just scrabbled to join them behind the wall. "Grab your Portkeys and-"

He paused, and the entire Hall fell silent. Harsh white light suddenly blared through the windows, freezing all the fighters in the suddenly clear Great Hall. All the colors stood out in relief, the bright House ties and sharply black Death Eater robes all catching his eye. Then, as one, every head in the Hall turned to look at the ceiling as the entire room groaned. The starry roof, so far strangely undamaged, began and crumpled and twist like concave aluminum foil.

Everything paused again, and then the windows began to frost over.

"Oh, fuck," Sirius breathed. "Oh, fuck." He took advantage of the remaining stillness and cast a volume spell at his voice box, knowing he'd be heard in the Great Hall and whatever remained of the castle. "Grab your Portkeys! Everyone-evacuate now! Leave everything and evacuate now!"

He waited a few seconds, watching as dozens of people winked out of the hallway, Granger and the nearest three students included. Once Sirius was certain he was one of the few Order members left, he grabbed his own Portkey.

As something hooked his navel and began to pull him away, his eyes swept the Hall one more time. The last thing he saw was a bloody, messily black-haired head, the face brutally caved in and the rest of the body hidden under a pile of rubble that had once been the wall behind the Head Table.

* * *

><p>The next second he was at the Order's safe house.<p>

"Black! What the hell happened up there?"

He turned to Alastor Moody. "What do you mean, what happened? A rout, Moody; that's what happened."

"Not that – our sensors went mad just before you left, and no one knows what the hell happened."

"It was Voldemort," Peter said, walking through the doorway and carrying a wailing first year that had angry burns on the side of his face. Sirius vaguely recalled him as a student with the last name of Davin. "He was breaking down that Apparition wards; the whole place was beginning to buckle."

Moody whistled consideringly. "Hogwarts is gone then. All of the lower years got out, and about half of the upper years. The Potters are in the kitchen, in case you two were wondering. The trained medics are dealing with the more severe wounds, and the Potters are in charge of the less injured."

Sirius frowned heavily. "I don't suppose Harry is here, somehow?"

"Somehow?" Peter repeated, an eyebrow raised. "I'm sure he's around here somewhere. I mean, I haven't seen him yet, but…" Peter paused as he looked over Sirius's face. "He's not…?"

"Yeah," Sirius scrubbed a hand down his face, pushing back his anger. "He is. I had hoped that I just saw it wrong, but I knew I was just grasping at straws."

He sighed, "Peter, I'm feeling cowardly. Come with?"

Peter nodded. "Of course, Sirius. At the very least, they'll need the two of us to take their places as untrained medics."

The two walked toward the kitchen, the first year in Peter's arms weeping more quietly.

"No, no—James! Water here, bandages there! And fix your arm while you're at it. It's getting blood everywhere."

"You're a cold woman, Lily. Here I'm helping you with these arcane methods and you belittle my war wounds."

"Bandages over there, _sweetie_."

"Ow! Damn—_darn_ it."

A chorus of giggles rose up from the attached dining room as Sirius and Peter walked in. Sirius watched the married couple exaggerate their disagreements for the sake of the watching first and second years. The group had various bumps and bruises but very few serious injuries. The Potters, not too concerned with their health, were concerned with keeping the youngest children calm and out of the way.

"Padfoot! Wormtail! Save me from this evil woman!"

"Great," Lily sighed, after glancing at them to make sure they were relatively unharmed, "more of your ilk. Peter, I'll take him; here, by the table…"

Lily focused on the student Peter had brought in, and James kept an eye on Sirius and Peter as he rubbed burn ointment on another student's blistering arm. "So, what's news? We're convening in half an hour, as soon as the worst of what we can solve is taken care of."

"Speaking of which, where's that son of ours? He's been studying a bit of healing, he could be some help in here," Lily added as she traced her wand slowly over Davin's face.

"Lily," Sirius said softly, "James… Harry isn't here."

"Moody send him somewhere?" James asked, sending his newly repaired student back into the throng of children.

"No, Prongs. He's still at Hogwarts." Sirius waited until James turned around slowly, bleak realization dawning on his face. "He didn't make it."

Lily and James shared a long look, before Lily's mouth twisted in hatred.

"Who."

The question was asked in such a dead tone that it hardly seemed like a question.

"I don't know Lily. He was over by the Head Table when—"

"Don't you give me that shit, Sirius Black! Who killed my son?"

She was shrieking horribly at the end of it, and Sirius almost took a step back. Instead, he reached towards Lily, but James beat him to her. "Shh, Lily," he said. "Don't worry, we'll fix this. Hogwarts has fallen, we have to, we can do it, now."

His soft sentences, nonsensical to begin with as far as Sirius could tell, turned into meaningless croons.

Sirius and Peter shared a confused look. For all that Sirius hardly wanted Lily or James to have to mourn Harry, he had expected far mote of a reaction than one outburst and reassurances as to how it – any of it – could be fixed.

"James," Peter began cautiously. "You know what Sirius meant. Harry…"

"I know what Sirius meant," James said, turning his head to look at them. Rage flashed in his eyes, but his lips smiled. "And you're going to fix it, Peter."

Peter's eyes widened in comprehension. "No, Prongs. I can't. Any research I did as an Unspeakable was never meant for practical use. If I tried to dabble in Necromancy, even just to _talk_ to the dead, things would go horribly, horribly wrong. Hell, even in that idiotic Deathly Hallows drivel, messing with death doesn't end well."

"Necromancy?" Lily barked a laugh not unlike Sirius's at one of his most bitter moments. "We're desperate, not idiots. We don't want you to mess with necromancy. We want you to mess with time travel."

* * *

><p>"My cousin in Norfolk – that crazy Seer we all used to make fun of before she graduated – found us the best possible point of return." Remus leaned up against the wall at the front of the room. The Order watched him carefully, half out of residual fear of his werewolf status, and half out of concern at his ragged state. He had disappeared for over a month to research spin-off timelines and looked like he hadn't slept or had stable shelter since he left.<p>

"And that is?" Snape asked crossly.

"Early on in the year 1981. She was working on a more precise date, but Crouch got to her before she finished. She decided to blow up her house with both of them in it."

"Why 1981?" James asked. "That's right in the middle of the war. Why not before the whole thing started, or before Riddle even went to Hogwarts?"

Remus shrugged. "I asked her that, too. She said that a war would always have existed; if we took Voldemort out too early, there'd just be another Dark Lord that she'd know nothing about, one that's potentially far worse."

There were indistinct mutters about the improbability of this idea until Sturgis Podmore raised his hand in a silencing motion. "No, she was probably right. In the muggle world, people always wonder about the morality of strangling Hitler as a baby if they managed to find some sort of time travel. A historian, disregarding the ethics driving the question, said that there would have just been a different figurehead, because Germany was angry and Western sentiment was anti-Semitic. The only question is the degree to which the war and the Holocaust would have changed."

Remus shrugged again before continuing. At one point the conversation would have been interesting and fuel for several hours of discussion, but it was hardly relevant at the moment.

"She said that 1981 would be the only possible year to begin the defeat of Voldemort. Yes, 'begin,'" he repeated before any objections could be raised. "Apparently, if we choose to do this, it will take over another decade and half to fully kill the bastard, but she figured out the path that had the closest possibility of working."

Peter tapped his fingers idly on the table in front of him, thinking deeply as the group digested the news. Time travel was overly foolhardy: Voldemort was one problem, but the potential to cause some sort of rift in time – a problem no one, not even he or the other Unspeakables studying time, knew the full consequences of.

"This is fairly insane, isn't it?" Sirius muttered quietly to him. The dog Animagus knew very little about time travel, the majority of it contained in one misadventure centering around the theft of a past Head Girl's Time Turner, but he had heard Peter ranting about short-sighted idiots enough to know that whatever Remus was talking about didn't bode well.

"Yes," Peter said simply, not elaborating for a second. "What I want to know, though, is why everyone else but the two of us seems unsurprised by this whole idea."

While this comment was ostensibly directed at Sirius, he said it while leveling a glare a Remus, knowing full well that the werewolf could easily listen to their quiet conversation.

"I'm getting to that, Peter," he said, smiling tolerantly at Peter's annoyance. "Sybil, for all that she focuses mostly on time and pathways and other, more human-based, divinations, has a slight skill for prophecy. She told Dumbledore a prophecy nearly twenty years ago. It was enough to make him hire her, and it nearly came true, but not enough people really believed in it to make it become reality. Divination faded out of Hogwarts a few years later, and she's been drifting in and out of society ever since.

"She says, and there was a heavily implied 'I told you so' in this for you, Albus," the Headmaster sardonically toasted Remus' wry grin with his glass, "that had the prophecy actually been applied, Voldemort would already be dead."

"And this doesn't sound like the bitter ravings of a dried up hack?" Snape asked. "Of course she would want us to think that she was right, and, oh, if we had just listened to the sherry-slathered ramblings of a crooked fortune-teller, all of our problems would be solved?"

"Dear God in heaven," Peter said dryly, "Snape and I actually agree."

"Now, Peter…" Lily started, but Peter cut her off.

"No. This is ridiculous. You want someone to go back in time – twenty years into the past – and start mucking with things that we know for certain already happened? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and, as many people at this table can attest to, seeing as how they used to work in the Ministry, too, that covers a lot of ground. It can't be done, and if it can, it shouldn't.

"Do you remember Hestia Jones? The Death Eater killed her daughter, so she took a Time Turner and tried to undo it. She ended up creating a crater in the middle of London that killed millions, and we still can't figure out what exactly happened to the daughter. So," he turned to Lily, "listen, I'm sorry that Harry's dead, but we know it for a fact. There's nothing we can do, and sending some idiot back in time will only make things worse."

There was a beat of silence.

"From what Remus has told me," Albus said gravely, and Peter turned to look at him in continued frustration, "Sybil didn't think we should just send just any idiot back."

"Yes, Peter," Remus said, an infernal smile still curling at the edge of his mouth, "the particular idiot she was thinking of was you."

* * *

><p>Peter stared at the table piled with scattered parchment in front of him.<p>

Most of the other Order members were still rattling through the safe house, as teams of survivors from Hogsmeade and a more recent attack on St. Mungo's filtered in. The two Potters were trying to organize a system of beds for the numerous people who had no where else to go, and Dumbledore was straightening out all the objects taken from Hogwarts when they had retreated. The only two people left with him were Remus, who was nursing a black eye, and Sirius, who was reading a drawn timeline with suspicious interest.

"Well, this explains why we didn't know," the dog Animagus said, looking up at Peter as he snagged a different pile of parchment to flip through. "We were the only two who could have gone into the past. I have to say, though, I'm a bit relieved that they chose you."

"This still doesn't make sense," Peter muttered, looking at the records of Voldemort's attacks in the early 1980s. "What am I supposed to change? Even if I bring all of this information to Dumbledore, provided I even _get_ to the past, it'll all be useless when something changes. _And_, you're just happy you don't have my contacts in the Unspeakables that we could use to pull this off. All you know are a few meathead Aurors, and no one would believe you, anyway."

"It's worth a shot," Sirius said, grinning in agreement and pointing to a specific line. "Maybe if we had had all of the Aurors at this attack, when Voldemort didn't expect, and didn't find, any opposition, we could have taken him."

"That wouldn't work," Peter said with a sigh, "the prophecy is supposed to be key: that means either Harry or Neville Longbottom will be the one to actually kill him. For all that that nutty Seer said Voldemort would be dead by now, I can't see a toddler killing him."

Almost tentatively, Remus spoke. Peter gave him a narrow-eyed glare before letting him continue. "The primary thought that Albus and I had was about the general trend of the information. While it would be useful for a couple of the more devastating attack, we could have changed our strategy if we knew he was going to ever succeed in taking the Muggleborn log from Hogwarts, or knew to be more persuasive about removing the Dementors from Azkaban."

"I really hate the overall idea, but if Harry or Neville really could have killed Voldemort…" Sirius trailed off.

"Yeah," Peter agreed, "but if I do go back, who's to say Harry won't just die sooner, especially if Voldemort focuses entirely on him. In fact, if this prophecy does enter into things, then the likelihood that James and Lily – that all of us, too - die becomes much higher. Of course, that particular death count excludes the universe itself taking issue to all this."

Peter let the conversation lapse, as he looked back over the parchments. He knew most of the information by heart already – though some of the department reports and specific casualty lists weren't known to him, and a copy of the prophecy lay on the corner of the table.

The only thing he didn't know was the spell that would send him back into the past, because he refused to listen to any specifics about it. The Unspeakables could never test out new time-based theories themselves; they could only ever use inanimate objects, animals, or volunteers from other Departments. If someone who knew a new method of time travel ever used it to go back to the future, one of the Department of Mysteru's founders had theorized, then he would travel into a new dimension instead of backwards in their own. For all that Peter couldn't see the logic in this stipulation, the superstition had been so engrained in him that he refused to take the risk: the last thing he wanted to do was abandon this universe for another.

"Shit," he concluded. "I'm going to do this, aren't I?"

"Yes," Mundungus Fletcher said from the doorway. The three jumped and turned to look at him, at first not noticing an old Black antique that he was holding.

"I'm sorry. I want Voldemort to die, I really do. I think he's an evil bastard that, at the very least, is bad for business. But more than I want him dead I want to live." He looked down at his hands, something like shame crossing his usually sly face. "I'd do anything to stay alive, even siding with the devil. So I hope you do the spell and that It works, but I don't think it will."

He sighed, and said, "I really am sorry." He dropped the antique and it shattered on the ground; Fletcher shifted into an Animagus form that none of them got a clear glimpse of and skittered into the shadows.

The Fidelius hiding 12 Grimmauld Place dissolved into nothing, and the front door crumbled to nothing in front of the waiting Death Eaters.

* * *

><p>"Motherfucking son of a bitch!"<p>

Tonks screamed in rage in she transformed the walls around her into alternating layers of titanium and diamond. She ignored, for the moment, that she was surrounded by kids all under the age of thirteen as she tried to reinforce the room from the vampires trying to smash their way in. Magically created sunlight did nothing to stop them, and the kids had been placed in a central room as they had all been dosed with potions with the hope that they'd all soon fall asleep and the Order could plan what to do next.

Now, however, they were all wide awake and huddled in the center of the room, watching her frantic movement with wide eyes. Finally, Tonks stopped to catch her breath, turning around to give them all a reassuring smile.

"Don't worry," she told them, ignoring the wrenching and cracking she could hear outside, marking the steady destruction of her transfigurations. Very little could stop a vampire once they had decided on a target, and Tonks knew she had bought them all very little time, let alone a chance at escape.

Aiming carefully between where she guessed the support beams of the floor above to be, she burned a hole through the ceiling and into the room of the next story. No light came form the room above, but there was no noise either, and, taking a deep breath, she lengthened her legs until her head poked through the head and into the darkness above.

She enlarged her ears and focused her eyes until they became far more powerful than a human's. She couldn't detect any movements or threats, and a quick sweep of her wand assured her that there were no Disillusioned figures waiting.

"Alright," she said, shrinking to normal dimensions, "we need to hurry and go through the room above. It's perfectly safe, and from there we can find a way out of the house and to somewhere secure. Is everybody ready?"

She got a few tentative nods in response, and she beckoned the nearest one closest to her. "I'm going to lift you into the room above, but wait there until we're all through."

Strengthening her arms and picking him up, she grew until she was halfway into the room above and placed him on the ground. He stood and backed a bit away from the hole, and she began to shrink down for the next kid when she heard a chuckle.

"Still a bit overconfident about the abilities of Auror spells?" A man's voice said, and a red light sliced across the room, dragging the boy away into the shadows in the direction of the sound. "Your aunt told me she warned you about that."

She opened her mouth to snarl a response – she now knew the voice to belong to Rodolphus Lestrange – when the detached head of the boy flew back at her. She caught it and glanced at the blood that slid down her hands. His eyes had the same glazed, surprised look of those hit with the Killing Curse, but also a flash of immobile anger that surprised her. She didn't think he would have had time to get angry in the last half-second of his life.

But she understood a bit, because in an instant she was far more furious than she had ever been, even angrier than when vampires began howling manically or when Bellatrix had killed her mother. She threw her fist forward, stretching out her fingers until they elongated across the distance of the room; her initial, blurry thought was to strangle him, but her fingers cracked and transformed into hard, sharp bone, driving straight through Lestrange's throat.

She withdrew her fingers with a series of wet pops and ducked back into the room below, quickly reaching back up to roll the boy's head into a darkened corner so as to not scare the waiting kids.

"Who's next?"

* * *

><p>Minerva McGonagall sat calmly outside the basement kitchen of 12 Grimmauld Place, where her former students sat and tried to figure out a plan for the future. Her legs, long ago transfigured into marble and cursed to reject any future transfigurations, had severely limited her mobility and, to her chagrin and frequent irritation, forced her out of any direct action.<p>

Nevertheless, she always managed to find herself in an area in need of her skills. At Hogwarts, the attack had caught her as she was flying up the main stairs just as classes were changing and the students were vulnerable in an open, wildly swinging environment; as the relatively tame bustle of the safehouse changed to frenzied terror and the pressure changed with the windows blowing inward and doors disintegrating, she again found herself at a central point of the battle.

Quickly flicking her wand and sending a Patronus towards Dumbledore – regardless of any protections the Headmaster could offer the students, and as much as she hated to think it, the childrens' safety was a secondary concern to spelling Peter into the future and Albus would be far more useful helping her – she set about making the surrounding area impenetrable. Only Albus or Voldemort would be capable of breaking through, and she was willing to wager that the former would hurry down to the basement faster… Tom always tended towards hits with more casualties and terror than strategic points.

She heard a choked off scream as she transfigured some of the air in the stairwell into powdered glass, but didn't pay it any mind as she also spelled the stairs to be everlasting. Anyone who dared to walk down them would be convinced that they were moving down a set of stairs that never ended, while locked in a standing position until she chose to change them into porcelain or mud or stacks of thread spools that she could knock over at her leisure. The preliminary defenses had been set up just seconds after the first sign of attack.

She raised an eyebrow placidly at a millipede that darted across the floor far more quickly than any insect had the right to dart.

"Black!" She called through the door to the kitchen. "Is there anything I should be informed about."

He crashed through the door halfway through her question. "Fucking Mundungus Fletcher," he snarled. "He-"

"Ah," she interrupted. "An Animagus?"

"Yeah, and-"

She waved her wand and the gravity over the frantic insect increased a thousand fold, leaving a cubic dent in the floor and the millipede crushed and still.

"Mr. Fletcher is no longer an issue," she said coolly. "Has Peter agreed to being sent back in time?"

"Well, he—"

"Yes or no, Black," she said severely as she changed the ceiling above into a one-way mirror.

"Yes," he answered. They watched as Dumbledore came running out onto the floor above. A small group of Death Eaters scattered, throwing multiple Killing Curses at the older wizard as they dove out of sight. He flicked his wand with a small frown and conjured a brick wall, spelling it out of existence once it had cracked under the impact of the Unforgivables. He waved his wand again and all the Death Eater heaved themselves upwards unwillingly, their torsos thrust forwards as if they were solely supported by a marionette string tied to their sternums. Then their bodies puffed into nothingness, their robes fluttering towards the ground as Dumbledore rounded the stairs to the basement, paying Minerva's spells no attention and walking quickly past the two of them.

"Well, Peter," Dumbledore said grimly, sealing the door shut behind him and nodding at Remus. "Are you ready for your impossible journey?"

Peter stood. "You _do_ know that the odds of the Universe exploding are fairly major, don't you, Albus?"

Remus shrugged Gallicly, as if the question had been directed at him instead. "What does that matter to any of us? We're all either dead or damned."

"Despite my preference for not taking such a dim view of reality, Mr. Lupin is entirely correct," Dumbledore agreed. "I find myself willing to do any number of things that I never would have considered even a year ago."

He sighed and shook himself. "Stand at the ready, Mr. Pettigrew, and do not be alarmed by any elements of the spell." He remained implacably firm when Peter raised a questioning eyebrow. "Just remember your friend's assertion of certain death and damnation. And good luck."

"Yes, Peter," Remus said with a small smile. "Don't screw this up like that one time when– "

There was a loud thud against the door, and they heard Minerva yelling shrilly.

Remus immediately cut off his last comment. "Hurry, Albus." He turned toward Peter and locked eyes with him, still with a small smile on his face.

Dumbledore spun his wand around in his hand until it seemed like he was holding a dagger. With no sign of his usual finesse, he slashed it across Remus; the werewolf's chest split open and his ribs cracked and bent away, though his body remained standing. Summoning the steaming heart, Albus slashed his wand through air and created a jagged line of nothingness that made everything in the kitchen begin to warp and bend away from it. He threw the heart in and began muttering to himself, ignoring Peter's horrified expression as his wand began darting in several small movements.

The jagged line hanging through the air changed into a smoother shape, one end solidifying into a black, metallic ice. Dumbledore grabbed this end, not appearing to notice the hiss as the ice began to eat away at his flesh. Then the old wizard whipped the line towards Peter, who almost jerked out of the way on reflex, but stood still as the end went through his chest and hooked into his heart.

Peter's vision doubled, and then quadrupled, as he felt a terrible void like the nothingness Albus had scratched into the air throughout his veins. He stumbled and fell to all fours, watching Dumbledore slowly disintegrate as pressure built up throughout the room.

And then, with a jarringly normal jumble of space like the squeeze of Apparition, he disappeared.


End file.
